"You can't make me go, not unless you drag me out by my fucking hair!" Jack shouted a mere thirty-eight hours or so earlier.
Evan Merridew stood on the other side of the large, blindingly white kitchen counter, his hands flat on the marble surface, cruel eyes fixated on his stubborn, pain-in-the-ass youngest child.
"You damn well know I will drag you out if I have to" Evan sternly clapped back at him.
"I'm not going" Jack sharpened his gaze, slamming his hands on the counter to match his father's stance, to prove that he was powerful enough to take on Evan Merridew.
"You are" Evan countered. "Out of fucking respect, you ungrateful bastard! You hear me? You have no goddamn respect for anyone 'cept yourself!"
"Wonder where I got that from!" Jack smugly yelled back, pushing his weight forward into the counter to prove that he wasn't afraid.
"That does it" Evan dropped his voice as he moved to get around to the other side of the counter.
Jack refused to show fear, even when he felt it. He turned around to face his father coming up beside him, crossing his arms smugly over his chest. Evan pinned him up against the counter top, his hand around the boy's small neck, a mere half inch of space between their bodies.
"You think you're fuckin' smart, huh?" Evan tightened his grip a little around Jack's neck, his voice intensely low and bone-chilling as it usually was.
"Yeah" Jack smiled, "I do."
It was quiet in the second floor office where Paige was studying, foam earplugs in her ears to help her focus. And then all of a sudden, it wasn't. A clear, loud bang compelled her to remove her earplugs, turning around abruptly, wide-eyed and concerned. She already knew what caused the sound, but she was hoping she might be wrong this time.
Maybe when pigs fly, she thought.
"Get off!" Jack's deafening shout evidently washed away the ounce of hope Paige had a sheer second earlier. She was out of her seat in half that time, running down the grand staircase. She stopped in her tracks in the archway, horrified but not surprised by the sight of her well-built father sitting on top of her brother's small frame. She watched as Jack managed to shift from his side onto his back, a trail of blood trickling down his face to pool on the beautiful, white floor beneath him.
"Dad!" Paige urgently screamed. "Please get off! It's enough!"
Neither Evan or Jack acknowledged that they heard or even saw Paige standing a mere few feet away from them. Jack continued to fight beneath his father, slapping and pushing at him, struggling to move his legs behind and underneath his dad's body. Evan simply held him down, pressing his shoulders against the floor as he waited almost boredly for Jack to stop struggling.
Jack thrashed beneath Evan as his agitated sister watched in horror. She held her hand over her mouth as tears formed in her eyes, not wanting to watch but unable to look away. Droplets began to trickle slowly down the girl's face as Jack became weaker; his twisting, turning, flailing, and hitting, slowing down until he surrendered completely. Jack laid still on the floor beneath Evan's heavy body, crushed by the overwhelming weight difference, trying but failing to catch his breath. One day, Evan would simply crush him to death, Paige feared. Jack's face was red and hot, and Evan could see tears welling in his eyes. But he knew Jack wouldn't cry, not in front of him. He never has, not once since he was a toddler.
This was all Evan wanted; the whole point of attacking Jack in the first place. He surrendered, stopped fighting, gave up, admitted defeat. Evan solidified his dominance over Jack, and the fact that he'd win every last time. And today was no different. He stripped Jack of his power, his dignity, his self-esteem. That was the point, it was always the point. If the kid got injured in the process, so be it. If he'd only surrender sooner, it wouldn't always end this way. Evan stood up, and spit down on the floor beside the boy, missing him by a half inch. Jack glared up at him, red hot in the face, humiliated but unwilling to admit it, as Evan stepped over him.
Evan finally found Paige's eyes as he discovered that she was actually present, not just a nagging voice in his head begging him to stop. He looked away from her as he passed her, walking through the archway without a word.
Paige glanced back down at Jack who was now sitting on the floor, carefully twisting his upper body and wincing from the obvious pain he was in.
"Jack" she hurried over to him, dropping to her knees at his side. "What is it? What hurts?"
"No, I'm good" Jack assured her in a raspy voice. He twisted his shoulder again and groaned in pain.
"Jesus!" Paige's eyes went wide as she finally looked over to the out-of-place shoulder on his other side. "That's dislocated, Jack!" she cried out in horror.
"Is not" Jack scoffed unsteadily, uncertainly.
"It's sitting way lower than the other one!" Paige insisted as she covered her mouth in shock. "I'm in nursing, idiot, I know what I'm talking about."
Jack glanced from one side of his body to the other, comparing each of his shoulders. Paige was right, he realized. The acknowledgment of his injury somehow made the pain worse, causing Jack to suppress the dying urge to cry.
"And your head" she sighed sadly, bringing a careful hand up to wipe away some of the blood running down the side of his face. "Here" she said, standing up to walk to the other side of the kitchen to retrieve a cloth that was hanging off the dishwasher's door handle. She bent down on one knee in front of him and held it to his head. It wasn't as deep as the cut he got from the kitchen drawer months earlier, but Paige was certain that he'd need stitches, which meant going to the hospital.
"Come on" she said gently, grasping onto the arm he was using to hold the cloth to his head to help him stand up. But Jack groaned in pain again, with more intensity, as he transferred his weight to his right leg. He plopped back down to the floor inevitably, squeezing his eyes shut tight in an effort to manage the increasing pain.
"What? I didn't even touch it" she urgently insisted. She really hadn't put any pressure on his dislocated shoulder, but perhaps he twisted it somehow in his attempt to stand.
"It isn't that" Jack's voice was tight and tense as he winched, pinching his eyes shut. "My knee" he winced again, "I can't--"
"Okay, okay" Paige hastily but quietly interrupted, glancing down at her brother's legs, unable to tell what was wrong on account of his sweatpants. "Which one is it? I'm gonna have to roll the pant leg up" she concluded as she braced herself for the agony. She felt damn lucky to have three years of nursing school under her belt right now.
"Right" Jack regretfully confirmed, continuing to pinch his eyes shut as he dropped his head.
Paige felt her heart beating aggressively inside her chest. She wasn't well trained for this, she knew, but she also knew she didn't have any other choice. She took an extra second to build up the courage before gripping the bottom of Jack's sweatpant leg and gently pushing it up. Jack cried out in pain as she pulled it over his knee.
"Holy shit" Paige sucked in a weighty breath of air as she covered her mouth again. Jack opened his eyes and glanced down at the obviously dislocated knee. "That's dislocated too" she observed in shock.
"You sure about that?" Jack asked in a heavy voice. "It doesn't hurt as much as my shoulder."
Paige reached down and rolled up Jack's other pant leg that was closest to her. The two of them glanced back and forth between Jack's bare knees.
"Yeah, that's fucked alright" Jack concluded with a nod. He winced in pain at the obvious difference, baffled by the way looking at the injury could somehow make it feel so much worse.
"Stay here" Paige said after a lengthy moment of thought. She stood up and hurried through the archway and up the grand staircase.
"As if I could fucking go anywhere" Jack scoffed mockingly at her once she was too far gone to even hear him. He turned to look back at his shoulder and shuddered from the intense jolt of pain that shot through the entirety of his upper right side at the sight.
Paige was gone for what seemed like a stupidly long time, Jack thought. But perhaps that was simply because he was sitting there, bored and broken, making time pass in the slowest increments humanly possible. Eventually, his sister returned, tossing her Motorola cellphone onto the counter as she passed by it. "It hasn't gotten any better, I imagine" she said as she bent down beside him again.
"No shit" Jack sneered at her, the chronic, intensifying pain making him irritable.
"Jesus, okay" she said to herself as she paced around in a circle, attempting to gather her thoughts long enough to come up with a viable plan. "I think I've gotta call 911, there's no way I can safely move you" she determined.
"911? Seriously? A little dramatic, don't you think? I'm not dying" Jack countered flatly.
"You got a better idea?" Paige widended her eyes challengingly at him. She was slowly but surely getting fed up with his attitude.
"I do" Evan's voice came from the archway, startling both kids. They turned their heads abruptly to look at him. He was leaning against the wall, like he'd been standing there longer than either of them realized. "I'll drive him there."
Jack wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or afraid. Would it have been better to have to explain this to a 911 operator or risk his father doing something to make it worse simply because he could?
"Why would you offer to do that?" Paige stood up to make herself level with him, as level as she could be given the height difference between the two of them.
"That's not your concern" Evan said as he approached them. He subtly pushed past Paige and bent down beside Jack. He heard the boy swallow all the fluid in his mouth, a clear sign of nervousness.
"Be careful!" Paige called out from behind him, standing over them as she watched intently. "His entire right side is basically immobile. One wrong move could make it a hell of a lot worse."
"You need to mind your own right now, missy" he turned his head to snap at his daughter.
"I'm a nursing student, Dad, I know what I'm talking about. The least you could do is listen to me" she folded her arms frustratedly over her chest.
"The least you could do is shut up and let me take care of it, you hear me?" he snapped again before turning back to Jack. The boy was clearly resistant to the idea too. Evan could feel that Jack was leaning back and away from him a little, his panicked eyes stuck on the man. Evan could also tell that he was trying damn hard not to show it.
"Alright, arm over my shoulder" he mumbled hardly audibly to Jack. Jack was evidently hesitant, but he eventually laced his left arm around his dad's shoulder. He felt Evan's hand slide underneath his left leg. He reached all the way under and down to his right shin, grasping onto it. He lifted himself and Jack both up effortlessly. The not-quite dry blood on the side of Jack's face and sleeve was rubbing up against Evan's white t-shirt as the man carried Jack past Paige and through the archway.
Uncomfortable couldn't even begin to encompass all the weird feelings Jack was experiencing as his father carried him through the house. This was the closest he and his dad had ever physically been without Evan's fist flying at his face, or crushing his bony little body with his built, much heavier one. Jack wanted to stay there like that for as long as they could, but at the same time he wanted to get as far away from Evan as possible. He was conflicted by his desire to be cared for by his dad and the little voice in his head reminding him that could never really happen. Jack leaned his bleeding head against his father's, sighing with a twisted confliction of contentment and discomfort. All his life he wanted nothing more than to be cared for, held, loved by his father. This, Jack realized, as Evan carried him out of the house and to his stupidly expensive and modernized truck, was the closest he would ever get to experiencing any of that.
Paige followed closely behind them, unwilling to leave her brother alone with her father. She climbed in the passenger seat of Evan's truck as he gently got Jack settled across the backseat. The boy sat sideways, leaning his back against the door. His left side was to the seat so his right side could be free of bumping against anything during the drive. Evan got into the drivers seat and turned the truck on. He drove around the little circular garden in the middle of the donut style driveway in the front courtyard and then down the lengthy road that led up to their mansion that was quite far from the roadway. Lucky, Paige scoffed to herself as she took in the expensive landscape around her. We're damn lucky alright.
Evan carried Jack into the hospital in the same way he carried him out to the car. Jack was admitted and brought in to the doctor rather quickly given his condition. Paige sat silently in the waiting room beside her father. She wondered if he knew that she went and called Child Intervention Services after she realized 911 was her only other option. She was unsure of where he'd been when she called from her bedroom on the top floor. Maybe he didn't know. But still, she sat anxiously beside him, wondering if the tension hovering between them was because of the phone call or simply their opposing positions in the situation as a whole.
"You're quite banged up, I see" the male doctor determined as he studied Jack's injuries. He already cleaned up the excess blood around the boy's head gash. A little cotton swab had been tapped over it by the nurse who was in before.
"I'm an idiot" Jack painfully shrugged with a laugh. "Forget to keep my eyes open sometimes, y'know?"
The doctor nodded slowly and simply. Jack could sense his hesitance to believe him, unsure of whether or not he could believe Jack obtained the injuries on accident.
"Tell me what happened, Jack" the doctor sighed, crossing his hands over the clipboard in his lap. "You can be honest, you won't be in any sort of trouble, I promise you that" he attempted to assure the boy.
"Course" Jack nodded simply. "I was going down the stairs, carrying a bunch of stuff. I missed a step about a quarter of the way down and tripped. I hit my head on the the railing at the bottom of the stairs. That's how I got this" he explained, pointing to his head wound, "and the rest of it must've happened during the fall. It's a pretty big staircase" Jack concluded with a relaxed nod.
"Are you sure that's all?" his doctor questioned.
"Well yeah, of course" Jack said, his eyes intently fixed on the doctor, his hands steady and calm, "why would I lie?"
"Okay" the doctor nodded with a tight smile. "It looks like you'll need a few stitches on that gash, and we're going to send you for x-rays on both your shoulder and knee to determine if you'll need surgery. I'm hoping not, but only the x-rays can tell for sure."
"Why would a dislocation need surgery?" Jack asked curiously. "Don't you guys just pop it back into place and that's that?"
Dr. Watkins laughed at the simplicity of the mind of the child. "Well, sometimes. But before we can do that, we have to make sure there aren't fractures in any of the dislocated bones. If there are, you'll need surgery to realign those bones."
"Well shit" Jack sat back as he took it all in. He winced a little before turning his attention back to the doctor. "Thanks, doc" he pointed at the man with a sly smile on his face.
Dr. Watkins laughed at Jack's lightheartedness. He was trained to look for child abuse anytime a child came in with an injury that wasn't so easily explained, or explained off with a story like the one Jack told. He'd seen too many kids come through his ward with stories that they simply fell or tripped. Oftentimes, the injury didn't quite match the severity or location of the injuries. These kids were reluctant, reeked of desperation, trying too hard to get the story straight, stumbling through their words, clearly double checking with their subconscious to ensure they had the vague details correct in their heads. But Jack Merridew didn't embody any of those characteristics. He was confident, charismatic, cracking jokes, not a hint of nervousness in his words or body language. He didn't stumble as he spoke, and he failed to emit any nervous energy that would suggest he was trying to hide something.
"Good afternoon, I'm Dr. Eli Watkins" the doctor greeted Evan about forty minutes after they arrived. He first called Evan's name into the waiting room and the man stood up, as did his daughter. Evan told Paige to sit back down and stay where she was while he talked to the doctor. She tried to resist but was shut down in a matter of seconds. She plopped back down onto the chair and sighed heavily, a nasty feeling settling in her stomach.
"Evan Merridew" he stuck his hand out to shake that of the doctor. "What's the verdict on my boy?"
"Well, we've determined that he'll need about nine stitches in his head. Those are quick and easy, painless for the most part. I'm mostly concerned about his shoulder. It does have a minor fracture in it, but regardless of how minor a fracture is, it still needs surgery to be properly repaired. I will be performing it tonight, all it does is realign the bones. We can then manipulate the shoulder back into its joint with the standard dislocation procedure we call reduction. Once he's stitched up, we'll do that procedure on his knee to slide the kneecap back into place. Then he'll be prepped for surgery for the shoulder. I'll give you all the recovery information once he's out of surgery and I can do so in adequate detail. It must've been quite the fall he had down those stairs based on the severity of his injuries. I see in his chart he's been hospitalized a couple times before over the past couple years" Dr. Watkins finished as he curiously pointed out.
"He's a daredevil, that kid" Evan laughed. "Never anticipates the potential consequences of his actions. Teenagers, don't ya know?" he chuckled lightly.
"I have two of my own" Dr. Watkins agreed. "My oldest can be like that too, but thankfully I haven't seen him through here very often."
"Well Jack's built pretty thin" Evan concluded. "He forgets how susceptible it makes his body to injury. Doesn't help that he's accident prone. He was admitted about a year and a half ago after a plane crash. He and a couple classmates from military school survived off a remote island for a few months before they were rescued and all brought in for an examination. I don't suppose you heard about it in the news" Evan explained, drawing attention to the hospital visit that couldn't possibly be connected back to his own actions.
"I did hear about that actually. I think the whole country did" Dr. Watkins confirmed. "What a tragic incident it was, right here in our home state nonetheless. I didn't realize Jack was one of them. I'm happy to be caring for him here if it means he made it through all that somehow. I heard almost half of those kids didn't."
"That's right" Jack's father validated the claim. "We'll be heading back to Bainbridge in less than two weeks for the two year commemoration. Bless the hearts of all those parents whose kids didn't make it."
"Yes, absolutely" Dr. Watkins nodded in agreement. "So just to confirm, Jack tripped down the big staircase, he said, hit his head on the railing. Were you present for the incident or did he tell you what happened after the fact?"
"I heard him fall but I didn't see it, I was in my office with the door closed. Came running as soon as I heard. My daughter's in nursing school so she made a good guess on the dislocations but I wanted to save myself the ambulance bill and brought him here myself" Evan expanded on Jack's made-up story.
"You did the right thing" Dr. Watkins put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "We'll begin attending to the other injuries before we prep for surgery. He'll have to stay overnight so we can monitor his post-surgical condition, but assuming all goes well, he should be clear for discharge late tomorrow morning or early afternoon."
"Thank you, Doctor" Evan smiled and shook the man's hand again before returning to sit back down beside his daughter.
"What lie did you cover it up with this time?" Paige asked flatly, keeping her gaze down at her lap.
"Watch your mouth" Evan quietly snapped at her.
"I can't do this" Paige responded seemingly out of the blue. "Do you know?" she asked, turning to face him.
"Know what?" Evan asked sharply with a hint of concern.
"So you don't" Paige concluded, sighing as she realized she'd have no choice but to tell him now.
"Know what?" he repeated more harshly. "Paige, if you don't tell me what the hell is—"
"I called Child Intervention Services" she fearfully admitted, dropping her head in an effort to look anywhere but into her father's eyes.
"You did what?" he raised his voice, earning a few stares from a few people around them.
"I had to" she said in a defeated but fearful tone. "I couldn't keep lying."
"All I've ever asked you to do is stay the hell out of it" Evan snarled as an angry dose of adrenaline pumped through his veins.
"Not telling the truth is the same thing as lying" Paige snapped, lifting her head to meet his eyes. "I'm sorry, Dad, but I'm not a gullible teenager anymore. I'm an adult and it's my job as his grown up sister to protect him."
Evan sighed deeply, sinking into his chair as he considered in a panic what to do next. Paige sat stressfully in the bitter silence, hoping that she hadn't made a decision that would render her fate similar to that of her brother's.
"Go home" Evan finally decided. He didn't look at her, he focused his gaze intently in front of him, like he was staring intently at something else.
"What? No way, I can't leave until we know what's happening with Jack" she argued.
"He's going into surgery" Evan informed her in a heavy, burdened voice. "His shoulder is fractured and they need to operate in order to realign the bones. He won't be released until tomorrow. Go home, have a shower, get some sleep. You can come back tomorrow morning if you must."
"But I—"
"No buts, Paige. I'm not asking. Go home."
She sighed heavily before gathering her purse and cellphone into her arms. She said nothing because she didn't know what to say to her father right now. She already concluded that her dad had cooked up another lie that he'd somehow get Jack to go along with. But this time, she wouldn't. For the first time, she decided she couldn't back him up anymore. She wasn't protecting Jack, or her family, or even herself. This time would be different because Paige Merridew was an optimist; an optimist who believed that her resistance alone would be enough to make a difference.